Evil is influence. When I influence I tug at the heart strings and engage an audience with an overwhelming portrait of sadness, beauty, depravity, graphic horror. Key to this demonstration is that in trying to engineer an effect I subject myself to the very influences I'm building into the performance. My embodiment as the performer doesn't shield me from the message. Instead it's reinforced. I subjected myself to my own psychological experiment, and I made myself the guinea pig.
Engaging this persona of evil I seek serenity. I accomplish this serenity as a feeling of unmediated engagement with the world depicted in my terse harangue. In this moment of creation I engage with that revelatory moment continually. This is how I juice myself. In this I find serenity.
Monday, February 28, 2011
Sunday, February 27, 2011
culture
Culture, we see the vague impressions of reflex in its recurring themes, its repetitive rituals.
The mind is an achievement, and epiphenomenal occurrence of self-awareness, stemming from fixing time in neural activity and using that as a baseline to judge change across time. There, fixed in the parapet of our vision we recognize the missing component, which accompanies our thought, us.
The mind is epiphenomenal to the stuff of its operation, the matter, the brain. The brain is a jumble of specialized motor neurons fixed into action networks existing in real space, operating in real time. That's the matter. Mind and its endless mystery is merely our own limit conditions of thinking of thinking. We set this problem up ourselves by basing the nature of thinking, the datum of thought, in a relationship of difference.
Our minds are merely an agglomeration of specialized motor nerve activity, operating in a resilient circuit. We've used that substantiation of mind, the action induced neural network, as the read-write condition for experience. And we shoehorn into this network-in-action the rhythm of recurrence, the steady beat of pattern with cycles. Upon this we narrate beginnings and ends. Yet we all know that our synthetic thought processes, owing to their own quasi-mathematical chemical-electrical nature, provide a substrate for experiencing. But this experience must happen according to its nature, and its nature is one defined by the neuron. The neuron's ability to both fluctuate frequency and amplitude of its activation furnishes a capacity to modulate energy. In doing so, within its limited time frame of activity before a refractory absence from operation it provides a structured essence of thought. Just as sound waves must be translated into a grooved surface to record them to vinyl, our minds require a world to concede to the requirements of this neuron to count as experience. It's nature emerges through the character of propagating a current across a nerve cell. That's an abject condition for activity, which doesn't provide an adequate 'thereness' to thinking as an outcome of that activity. In addition, the nerve cell's ability to operate in tandem with a vast network of like cells and do so repetitively suggests that the mind itself is a metaphor. It uses energy from the world, acquired by food, to conduct electricity continuously within specialized cells, which merely retain a sensory copy of that world. This is it? The world begets life literally through the fruits of spontaneous and incidental molecular interaction. Life begets the world metaphorically through a mind that uses a vast network of neurons to retain a personal copy of that world.
This is fascinating. The world in mind is the membrane through which a body learns to deal with the world. The price we pay for such a form of mediation is that we learn not necessarily of the world but the world as such. The as suchness of this world explains the effect of possessing this mind model of the world. That model is in fact artifactual, suggesting that the prior particulars that influenced this model become the germs of obsolesence.
To say that I study the mind is a conceit inherited from epistemology.
What I find fascinating is that we seek a rhythm in the world and fit it into the rhythm of thinking. Sometimes we're off rhythm and out of step, we fall, sometimes die. Some accidents are chance events. They befall those who are out of step.
The mind is an achievement, and epiphenomenal occurrence of self-awareness, stemming from fixing time in neural activity and using that as a baseline to judge change across time. There, fixed in the parapet of our vision we recognize the missing component, which accompanies our thought, us.
The mind is epiphenomenal to the stuff of its operation, the matter, the brain. The brain is a jumble of specialized motor neurons fixed into action networks existing in real space, operating in real time. That's the matter. Mind and its endless mystery is merely our own limit conditions of thinking of thinking. We set this problem up ourselves by basing the nature of thinking, the datum of thought, in a relationship of difference.
Our minds are merely an agglomeration of specialized motor nerve activity, operating in a resilient circuit. We've used that substantiation of mind, the action induced neural network, as the read-write condition for experience. And we shoehorn into this network-in-action the rhythm of recurrence, the steady beat of pattern with cycles. Upon this we narrate beginnings and ends. Yet we all know that our synthetic thought processes, owing to their own quasi-mathematical chemical-electrical nature, provide a substrate for experiencing. But this experience must happen according to its nature, and its nature is one defined by the neuron. The neuron's ability to both fluctuate frequency and amplitude of its activation furnishes a capacity to modulate energy. In doing so, within its limited time frame of activity before a refractory absence from operation it provides a structured essence of thought. Just as sound waves must be translated into a grooved surface to record them to vinyl, our minds require a world to concede to the requirements of this neuron to count as experience. It's nature emerges through the character of propagating a current across a nerve cell. That's an abject condition for activity, which doesn't provide an adequate 'thereness' to thinking as an outcome of that activity. In addition, the nerve cell's ability to operate in tandem with a vast network of like cells and do so repetitively suggests that the mind itself is a metaphor. It uses energy from the world, acquired by food, to conduct electricity continuously within specialized cells, which merely retain a sensory copy of that world. This is it? The world begets life literally through the fruits of spontaneous and incidental molecular interaction. Life begets the world metaphorically through a mind that uses a vast network of neurons to retain a personal copy of that world.
This is fascinating. The world in mind is the membrane through which a body learns to deal with the world. The price we pay for such a form of mediation is that we learn not necessarily of the world but the world as such. The as suchness of this world explains the effect of possessing this mind model of the world. That model is in fact artifactual, suggesting that the prior particulars that influenced this model become the germs of obsolesence.
To say that I study the mind is a conceit inherited from epistemology.
What I find fascinating is that we seek a rhythm in the world and fit it into the rhythm of thinking. Sometimes we're off rhythm and out of step, we fall, sometimes die. Some accidents are chance events. They befall those who are out of step.
Friday, February 18, 2011
to be or not to be
A book about disciplinary power situates it in the habits that state institutions drilled into the denizens. To be a state is to act according to the habits drilled in you by the state. The hearts and minds come later; they're epiphenomenal. What one can do is act, and act without really understanding the philosophy of that act. It's meaning, be it ultimate or not, comes later, an after-effect.
To act is to be. Some acts conjure into existence things that others do not want to exist. I speak my mind. I act on my feelings. These conjure something into being, a subjectivity that threatens the subjectivity of others. It's all in the mind, but the acts are where we find the only real stuff.
Perhaps I place too much truck in this activity. I trust that drilling habits makes power automatic in the political body. If some act in ways that seem to flout their respect for others, their exclusive relations with others, and their relationship to the object of their actions is that real?
Is it real? Does acting, even if it's a performance, conjure up the very relationship to which it elides? Yes. Does this performance, this act, have an effect if someone dances dirty with someone who isn't one's partner. That is trickier to diagnose. Swingers are older couples, couple who are so deeply ingrained in their habits with each other that no matter of performance, no matter how real, no matter how deep cannot shake that habit.
Love is drug abuse. Love is a habit that one cannot shake. Love engages those same neural structures that reinforce habit, to engage in it again and again.
Love is a poverty of creativity. Over time, love frames our vision, our relationship with a significant other becomes a paradigm that is hard to break. To do so requires a revolution. History of public dissent shows how quickly, once the discontent piles up, that a simple act of sitting down, rallying, or petitioning can raise the consciousness of a group. But I'm talking about couples, dyads, not masses.
We interact with ourselves through our bodies, our eyes, our ears. If we can conjure up an alternative version of ourselves, which is nevertheless real, we drive a wedge between our current habit-filled, banal situation and a scary, unforeseen possible future, one that perhaps disavows the past and those people who populate it.
How do we guard ourselves? It's a matter of attitude. If you can play along in the careless joy of simulation, play-acting, performance, and you're ok with it, perhaps you can get dirty with the wives of your friends in a drunken yet consensual act and walk away. But this, like that simple real act, can plant a seed in that network of habits. To call the effect a cascade is too metaphorical. The stuff of nerves is real, electric, and mathematical-geometric in organization. When we play-act we're only trying to fool ourselves; it's how we transgress the seemingly stable networks briefly without believing ourselves nor convincing others that we have transgressed.
Why is self-reflexivity viral? Perhaps our view of the virus is merely a metaphor for considering our own displacement, externalization from the nature of things through self-reflexivity. The virus is a stunning simplicity, a zero condition from which all else is measured. The virus is not self-replicating, yet it contains its code and knows how to pirate the production facilities of foreign cells in order to sustain itself. Ideas, are they self-replicating? They emerge out of something and they spread like a virus. Their ability to infect is yet another metaphor. A virus is a prior condition for life: motive without means. It reveals life as an aggressor. Life must take in order to sustain itself. The virus, it is a transgressor.
Perhaps thinking, and thinking as such, taps us into this deep stream. It's probably an incidental feature, something made possible by the nature of neural organization only because it was a path of least resistance.
Thinking's substance is the world around us. Acting's props are the world around us. This substance and these props can be people, things, and ideas already in circulation. Cognition isn't a centralized activity. Cognition is displaced into the scene. Knowledge and wisdom are in the world; it's a source of endless wonder, and how we choose to relate to it bears upon us.
So if the stuff of thinking and acting is out there, when we choose to do what out there affords us to do, is that real? Does it have a motive? If one chooses to swap partners because that possibility is there, is that motive or merely opportunity? What goads this? Is it merely insecurity or lack of creativity that keeps us from acting upon it? That's a very tricky situation. The phenomenal existence of cheating is in the presence of situations that afford this action. But these opportunities usually go untapped. But they're there. Are we any better to break from our habits to act? Are we any more in control if we do so?
Perhaps control is a precarious balance of habit and innovation and a burgeoning propriety about how to manage this. The habits of mind, body, mouth, and social relations are how we build ourselves. Extracting ourselves from that social setting changes us. Trying so very hard to maintain those is about trying so very hard to keep these neurons pulsing. Strange that our minds become so beholden to their networks, so that we must try very hard to sustain the ties in the world that correspond to them. Keeping a lover is a pragmatic orientation to a neural network built for the sake of that relationship. Keeping a network of friends is a pragmatic orientation to a neural network built for the sake of that network.
So our mind, in all its resplendent complexity, is a hard habit to break. Our relations, our attitudes, our habits, our actions reflect upon this interaction between some sub-set of our mind and itself and and this mind as constructed and the world that conspired, incidentally, in its creation.
To act is to be. Some acts conjure into existence things that others do not want to exist. I speak my mind. I act on my feelings. These conjure something into being, a subjectivity that threatens the subjectivity of others. It's all in the mind, but the acts are where we find the only real stuff.
Perhaps I place too much truck in this activity. I trust that drilling habits makes power automatic in the political body. If some act in ways that seem to flout their respect for others, their exclusive relations with others, and their relationship to the object of their actions is that real?
Is it real? Does acting, even if it's a performance, conjure up the very relationship to which it elides? Yes. Does this performance, this act, have an effect if someone dances dirty with someone who isn't one's partner. That is trickier to diagnose. Swingers are older couples, couple who are so deeply ingrained in their habits with each other that no matter of performance, no matter how real, no matter how deep cannot shake that habit.
Love is drug abuse. Love is a habit that one cannot shake. Love engages those same neural structures that reinforce habit, to engage in it again and again.
Love is a poverty of creativity. Over time, love frames our vision, our relationship with a significant other becomes a paradigm that is hard to break. To do so requires a revolution. History of public dissent shows how quickly, once the discontent piles up, that a simple act of sitting down, rallying, or petitioning can raise the consciousness of a group. But I'm talking about couples, dyads, not masses.
We interact with ourselves through our bodies, our eyes, our ears. If we can conjure up an alternative version of ourselves, which is nevertheless real, we drive a wedge between our current habit-filled, banal situation and a scary, unforeseen possible future, one that perhaps disavows the past and those people who populate it.
How do we guard ourselves? It's a matter of attitude. If you can play along in the careless joy of simulation, play-acting, performance, and you're ok with it, perhaps you can get dirty with the wives of your friends in a drunken yet consensual act and walk away. But this, like that simple real act, can plant a seed in that network of habits. To call the effect a cascade is too metaphorical. The stuff of nerves is real, electric, and mathematical-geometric in organization. When we play-act we're only trying to fool ourselves; it's how we transgress the seemingly stable networks briefly without believing ourselves nor convincing others that we have transgressed.
Why is self-reflexivity viral? Perhaps our view of the virus is merely a metaphor for considering our own displacement, externalization from the nature of things through self-reflexivity. The virus is a stunning simplicity, a zero condition from which all else is measured. The virus is not self-replicating, yet it contains its code and knows how to pirate the production facilities of foreign cells in order to sustain itself. Ideas, are they self-replicating? They emerge out of something and they spread like a virus. Their ability to infect is yet another metaphor. A virus is a prior condition for life: motive without means. It reveals life as an aggressor. Life must take in order to sustain itself. The virus, it is a transgressor.
Perhaps thinking, and thinking as such, taps us into this deep stream. It's probably an incidental feature, something made possible by the nature of neural organization only because it was a path of least resistance.
Thinking's substance is the world around us. Acting's props are the world around us. This substance and these props can be people, things, and ideas already in circulation. Cognition isn't a centralized activity. Cognition is displaced into the scene. Knowledge and wisdom are in the world; it's a source of endless wonder, and how we choose to relate to it bears upon us.
So if the stuff of thinking and acting is out there, when we choose to do what out there affords us to do, is that real? Does it have a motive? If one chooses to swap partners because that possibility is there, is that motive or merely opportunity? What goads this? Is it merely insecurity or lack of creativity that keeps us from acting upon it? That's a very tricky situation. The phenomenal existence of cheating is in the presence of situations that afford this action. But these opportunities usually go untapped. But they're there. Are we any better to break from our habits to act? Are we any more in control if we do so?
Perhaps control is a precarious balance of habit and innovation and a burgeoning propriety about how to manage this. The habits of mind, body, mouth, and social relations are how we build ourselves. Extracting ourselves from that social setting changes us. Trying so very hard to maintain those is about trying so very hard to keep these neurons pulsing. Strange that our minds become so beholden to their networks, so that we must try very hard to sustain the ties in the world that correspond to them. Keeping a lover is a pragmatic orientation to a neural network built for the sake of that relationship. Keeping a network of friends is a pragmatic orientation to a neural network built for the sake of that network.
So our mind, in all its resplendent complexity, is a hard habit to break. Our relations, our attitudes, our habits, our actions reflect upon this interaction between some sub-set of our mind and itself and and this mind as constructed and the world that conspired, incidentally, in its creation.
Tuesday, February 15, 2011
love is like drug abuse
Love is like drug abuse.
Like drugs, love is expensive, but it makes you feel good.
You develop a tolerance, but you don't know when you crossed that threshold.
You lose track of time, but don't mind as long as you're under its effects.
You lose control, but having chosen your means of losing it you rationalize that you're in control.
It makes you paranoid, and you develop irrational thinking patterns.
You become utterly dependent, and your attempts to quit the habit require a belligerent attitude that vacillates between hatred, contempt, indifference, affection, concern, murder, and suicide.
Love, like drug abuse, focuses your attention incessantly and obsessively on the topic. And so you seek out forums for people suffering like you, and so you share, and share alike in a vast community of like-minded sufferers.
But I can't seek treatment for love abuse.
Like drugs, love is expensive, but it makes you feel good.
You develop a tolerance, but you don't know when you crossed that threshold.
You lose track of time, but don't mind as long as you're under its effects.
You lose control, but having chosen your means of losing it you rationalize that you're in control.
It makes you paranoid, and you develop irrational thinking patterns.
You become utterly dependent, and your attempts to quit the habit require a belligerent attitude that vacillates between hatred, contempt, indifference, affection, concern, murder, and suicide.
Love, like drug abuse, focuses your attention incessantly and obsessively on the topic. And so you seek out forums for people suffering like you, and so you share, and share alike in a vast community of like-minded sufferers.
But I can't seek treatment for love abuse.
Sunday, February 13, 2011
a life in tatters
Why?
Why is experiencing life's strangeness so shocking? Why do I live in a bubble? Why can't I love without passing through a zone of obsessive, irrational, and violent possessiveness? Why do I lose my head? Why am I so sad?
Why am I so naive to believe that I know my friends. Why are my feelings terrifying to others when my actions are so benign? Why do I feel as if I hardly know any of my friends? Why do their actions shock me? Why do I maintain this naivete about who they are?
Why do I let this bother me? Why is my empathy some kind of invasive vine that spreads all over my relations?
I know why they call it a nervous system? I'm systematically made nervous by what I witness.
Why is experiencing life's strangeness so shocking? Why do I live in a bubble? Why can't I love without passing through a zone of obsessive, irrational, and violent possessiveness? Why do I lose my head? Why am I so sad?
Why am I so naive to believe that I know my friends. Why are my feelings terrifying to others when my actions are so benign? Why do I feel as if I hardly know any of my friends? Why do their actions shock me? Why do I maintain this naivete about who they are?
Why do I let this bother me? Why is my empathy some kind of invasive vine that spreads all over my relations?
I know why they call it a nervous system? I'm systematically made nervous by what I witness.
Saturday, February 12, 2011
to have seen too much
To quote Roy Batty, "I have seen things..."
Some things should not be seen.
To watch a party that starts out with drink end with the oddest scenes of simulated sex behavior is one such example. When these are your friends, your close allies, the people with whom you share your deepest, oddest, strangest feelings the juxtaposition is too much. I can't stand seeing a woman, a woman I achingly and awkwardly fell for, dance with a friend who likes to press my buttons.
Marital aids.
I witnessed marital aids in action. I am disqualified from being one. I truly am. I cannot be a marital aid. I can't get nude for the sake of some oddly simulated performance. I can't bracket the experience. It's all too real to me. I can't shake the simulation. It passes for my reality. I have no frame from which to gain perspective. I'm swimming in it. This happened before, and it never happened again. It was my birthday. I had turned 32. I danced with this same woman, the woman dancing with the button-pusher. It was, at that point, the most erotic experience I've had in some time. It was real to me, all too real. I extracted myself like a fussy baby. I lost the nerve. I was disqualified then. The same players were involved then as now, but this time I was benched, on the sidelines a spectator upon this sexual sport.
I've seen things, things, which make sense now, but needed time to settle in. I am a friend. I am part of a network of friends, most of whom can play these odd sexual games with little to no side-effect. I'm a walking, prancing, waltzing, lancing boil of a side-effect. I'm a product of these relations upon which I have little to no effect, other than negative. As I said, I was disqualified from being any more a marital aid. She said she loved me once. Squeezed me, she did. Pulled me into her arms, she did. Told me she loved me, she did. Said it was an inevitability, she did. I was thrown headlong into a dream, a dream come true. Immediately aroused, squeezing her close, I did. Share my feelings, I did. Lost oh so lost in a dream I was. Scared and clawing at her I was. Trying so hard to get close I was. Trying in a fractured, distorted, terrified, attempt at sharing I was, my feelings. Scared her away I did. Disqualified I was. Left in the dark again I am. Forever in the dark, unable to make sense of it all objectively, rationally, to put it away, this ocean of feeling opened up. She opened it. She grew scared of the consequences, that lack of cartoonish simulation, that lack of performance, the unmitigated love, fear, hate, sorrow, longing with which I rushed at her. She shut me out. I've been out. I've been so terribly, terribly shunned, shuttered, discarded, disqualified, feared, made into some kind of monster.
I am a monster merely for sharing my heart, my moody, possessive, absolute, desiring heart. She wanted none of it.
There, with my heart laid bare, sitting in a chair, watching her getting her ass fingered by the button-pusher. I spoke plainly in a sudden epiphany, "I got it," meaning it made sense now. The button pusher, and my other friends at this evening gathering were marital aids. She got her fill. She got her titillation. She put on her show. She had her fun. I could only watch, uncomfortably, as she was groped as she danced. And she never looked at me once. I wasn't there. I shouldn't be there. I've seen too much.
Some things should not be seen.
To watch a party that starts out with drink end with the oddest scenes of simulated sex behavior is one such example. When these are your friends, your close allies, the people with whom you share your deepest, oddest, strangest feelings the juxtaposition is too much. I can't stand seeing a woman, a woman I achingly and awkwardly fell for, dance with a friend who likes to press my buttons.
Marital aids.
I witnessed marital aids in action. I am disqualified from being one. I truly am. I cannot be a marital aid. I can't get nude for the sake of some oddly simulated performance. I can't bracket the experience. It's all too real to me. I can't shake the simulation. It passes for my reality. I have no frame from which to gain perspective. I'm swimming in it. This happened before, and it never happened again. It was my birthday. I had turned 32. I danced with this same woman, the woman dancing with the button-pusher. It was, at that point, the most erotic experience I've had in some time. It was real to me, all too real. I extracted myself like a fussy baby. I lost the nerve. I was disqualified then. The same players were involved then as now, but this time I was benched, on the sidelines a spectator upon this sexual sport.
I've seen things, things, which make sense now, but needed time to settle in. I am a friend. I am part of a network of friends, most of whom can play these odd sexual games with little to no side-effect. I'm a walking, prancing, waltzing, lancing boil of a side-effect. I'm a product of these relations upon which I have little to no effect, other than negative. As I said, I was disqualified from being any more a marital aid. She said she loved me once. Squeezed me, she did. Pulled me into her arms, she did. Told me she loved me, she did. Said it was an inevitability, she did. I was thrown headlong into a dream, a dream come true. Immediately aroused, squeezing her close, I did. Share my feelings, I did. Lost oh so lost in a dream I was. Scared and clawing at her I was. Trying so hard to get close I was. Trying in a fractured, distorted, terrified, attempt at sharing I was, my feelings. Scared her away I did. Disqualified I was. Left in the dark again I am. Forever in the dark, unable to make sense of it all objectively, rationally, to put it away, this ocean of feeling opened up. She opened it. She grew scared of the consequences, that lack of cartoonish simulation, that lack of performance, the unmitigated love, fear, hate, sorrow, longing with which I rushed at her. She shut me out. I've been out. I've been so terribly, terribly shunned, shuttered, discarded, disqualified, feared, made into some kind of monster.
I am a monster merely for sharing my heart, my moody, possessive, absolute, desiring heart. She wanted none of it.
There, with my heart laid bare, sitting in a chair, watching her getting her ass fingered by the button-pusher. I spoke plainly in a sudden epiphany, "I got it," meaning it made sense now. The button pusher, and my other friends at this evening gathering were marital aids. She got her fill. She got her titillation. She put on her show. She had her fun. I could only watch, uncomfortably, as she was groped as she danced. And she never looked at me once. I wasn't there. I shouldn't be there. I've seen too much.
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